Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I’d like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I’d also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
I asked the same and was met with a lot of “do it in a laptop first”. Ended up buying a r730 for $350.
Also everyone saying this thing would be an aircraft in terms of noise and heat. Its running quieter than my main pc or a regular ceiling fan. The fans stay around 5% unless you’re booting it. (Look up idrac fan control). Its uses more power than a laptop, though. Averages at 73w. I’m very happy with it. Running LXCs under proxmox with jellyfin, arrs, pihole, truenas, tailscale/cloudflare and some other random VMs for fun.
Well, R720 is quite old. I would look into R730/R630 options. Or ideally, use some hardware that you already have. An old laptop with Proxmox might very well be a start.
In terms of starter rackmount this is a great one. I started with an R710 a few years ago as I needed more processing power than a traditional tower offers. Few years after that I got an R720 for work in my colo.
Two great servers!!!
It’s a really good starter kit as it will quickly teach you to choose the next hardware properly, i.e. to balance the need for cpu power, ram, hdd sizes with the power consumption cost.
Despite what other people are saying, the noise on these depends on your bios settings. If you set everything for high performance, it’s going to be loud. I’d start off with the energy saving settings until you decide you need more power. With mine set to energy saving, because it’s honestly more power than I need right now with 16 cores; 32 threads; 176 GB RAM and (4) 6 TB hard drives for storage (not including boot drives), the server is actually very quiet. It’s quieter than my PowerConnect 6248P POE switch. I’d say it’s a great server for starting off with if you can get a good deal on it. I run VMWaee ESXI with multiple virtual machines, TrueNAS; pfSense; Plex; VMWare VCSA and a couple of others for just playing around with different operating systems when I need to. Even with power saving settings, I have no performance issues with anything I do as a home server. Now, in a production environment, data center, corporate server running critical tasks, I would never choose power saving settings. But for most people, it’s not likely you will need the full performance of something like this in a home environment. And, if you start using more of the processor, or have it in a room that’s not air conditioned on a warm day, it will automatically increase fan speed as needed anyway. Not that I recommend a room without temperature and humidity control of some kind, but it can handle it to an extent when not in a live production environment.
